Modern construction projects have a lot of moving parts. From a modest suburban residence to a shopping mall, almost any project requires specialists of different profiles, materials, inventory, and equipment to be monitored and effectively coordinated. Each phase of a construction project, such as design, preconstruction, procurement, and construction, has its specific complexities, making the whole process even more complicated.
That’s why there’s the need for custom construction management software designed specifically for a construction company’s needs. In this article, we’ll consider why the use of such software is so important and how your construction business can benefit from adopting such a system.
What is Construction Project Management Software
To make sure that your efforts are well-coordinated and all tasks are carried out as planned, most probably, you should have a construction project manager. This person’s list of responsibilities usually includes project cost estimation, creating schedules and work timetables, defining the preferable methods for a specific project, communication with clients and intermediaries, leading with workers on technical details, and others.
As you can imagine, at some point, dealing with all these tasks may become an unbearable task. Especially if a project manager has to deal with multiple projects in various locations, that’s why specialized software may become pretty helpful.
With construction project management software, you can organize and automate dozens of daily tasks related to planning, scheduling, building, resources allocation, and reporting. Such applications allow managers to improve control over every phase of a project and keep stakeholders informed about the current state of affairs thanks to built-in report generation tools. Advanced document management tools may also be pretty useful since every construction project generates extensive documentation.
At XB Software, during the construction project management software development, we often rely on DHTMLX, a JavaScript UI framework for custom web app development. It provides a wide variety of development tools and components that help our developers to create web apps with rich interface and outstanding performance. Now, let’s look at some features typical for construction project management software that we can build using DHTMLX.
For example, DHTMLX Gantt Chart helps us provide construction project managers with access to a visual timeline for the construction project. Besides the visualization feature, it allows editing construction schedules with ease.
Image source: https://dhtmlx.com/docs/products/dhtmlxGantt/
Project managers can use Gantt charts to see the actual progress of the whole project or some specific tasks in real-time. The visualization of dependencies between tasks can help determine the bottleneck quickly and find a particular task that will affect the overall project time the most.
Resource management is another crucial issue. There are construction workers, architects, plumbers, electricians, and other staff members at a construction project. These specialists use specific equipment and materials, such as concrete, wires, pipes, etc. This info needs to be included in the project and taken into account since it affects the overall project cost and duration. Resource management is a pretty important feature of construction project management software that can help you to monitor the availability, skill set, and allocation of your specialists, materials, and equipment.
Image source: https://dhtmlx.com/blog/dhtmlxgantt-6-0-major-update-advanced-resource-management/
Also, this feature allows monitoring employees’ workload and managing their working hours to comply with regulations.
These, and many other features, combined can improve your business processes and provide your construction company with many benefits. Which ones? Let’s find out.
Benefits of Adopting Construction Project Management Software
Proper Scheduling
Advanced task scheduling tools allow you to build the plan of the future construction project and help to monitor the progress in real-time. If there is a change in a specific task, the system will inform the whole team assigned to the project instantly. Managers can get a comprehensive view of all the current company activities to understand what specialist or which equipment is required in which location, what causes delays, what will be the consequences, and by what means these consequences can be overcome. Real-time snapshots enable effective monitoring of activities, necessary if you want to know when to speed up to meet your deadlines.
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Effective Task Allocation
Efficient delegation of tasks is significant if you want to quickly find out who does what and make sure that every employee knows their area of responsibility. Project management software designed in accordance with your organization’s needs enables the transparent distribution of roles and responsibilities. You can quickly assign a specific task, and an automated notification system will inform the employee about it. In case of need, you can easily define who’s answerable for delays that may take place.
Easy Document Management
From design to construction, each project phase generates tons of documents, and it may be pretty hard to handle all this extensive documentation manually. Project management software for construction companies can provide its users with centralized access to digitized documentation stored in the cloud, simplifying sharing data among team members and stakeholders. Stakeholders can access wireframes, blueprints, specifications, and any other documentation piece with a few clicks. Built-in sorting and searching features can significantly simplify the document management process. With such a system, you can be sure that your documents will never be lost, misplaced, or duplicated.
Better Communication and Collaboration
The specifics of the construction business requires effective communication. For example, managers can plan the construction project in the office while the plumbers are laying pipes in the building under construction and the architect is examining the construction site in some other location. In such a case, it’s essential to ensure that these specialists can exchange necessary data effortlessly if such a need arises. Mobile devices support, for example, can guarantee fast and secure communication. All the employees associated with the project can access the relevant information that helps with better planning and execution of a project. Easy access to the team dashboard, shared calendar, and task list ensures that each employee is on the same page and the project will be finished on time.
Advanced Resource Management
Effective resource management is another way of how your construction company can benefit from adopting project management software. Resource management is closely connected to the overall cost of the project and therefore influences your revenue. Resources you have to deal with during the work on the project include inventory, equipment, vehicles, skills, and knowledge of your employees that you have to monitor constantly. Software tools can help you check if the current usage of resources is aligned with the initial plan or if there’s room for improvements.
Construction project management software can record every detail of the project, analyze it, generate regular reports, and provide valuable insights. The system can regularly generate interactive reports and send them to stakeholders. Access to such data allows analyzing the project’s current state, comparing it against initial estimates, and taking immediate action if needed.
Conclusions
Construction management software provides access to a set of management tools designed according to the business’s specifics. Such applications allow improving planning, coordinating, and controlling the construction project during all stages. Custom-made project management software built with your organization’s needs kept in mind will help you streamline work processes, complete construction projects safely, on time, and within budget.
If you want to learn more about how custom construction management software can help you to optimize your costs and automate a dozen of routine tasks, please contact us.